Legacy Archive Data Management Prerequisites

In order to utilize Legacy Archive Data Management services, there are some prerequisites that must be met, which are detailed below:

Purchase Legacy Archive Data Management

You will first need to calculate the expected amount of data to be provided to Mimecast in the accepted formats on which Legacy Archive Data Management is charged. Most email and archive systems typically compress data approximately 2.5 times and have a single instance of messages sent to multiple recipients. Products used to determine this information may differ when reporting the uncompressed or compressed amounts and/or the ratio of single instance.

All data exported from your system will be uncompressed and will contain duplicates of messages with multiple internal recipients. It is important to consider both the loss of compression and single instance items when calculating this estimated amount of data.

Mimecast representatives provide the Ingestion options and their costs according to your environment, requirements and estimated amount of data. The Legacy Archive Data Management process begins when an agreement has been reached for the estimated amount of data you expect to provide for import.

Orders are based on the amount of data actually provided and processed, not on the amount of data that appears in the archive as a result of the Legacy Archive Data Management process.

Microsoft Exchange Journaling

Before you commence exporting and collecting your historical email, Mimecast must be archiving all your organization’s current emails. This is achieved through Journaling for all internal and external messages, and is typically referred to as the Ingestion Cut-off Date for the purpose of the Ingestion process.

Those items sent after the Cut-off Date will not be imported as these should already exist in your Mimecast Archive.

To reduce the possibility of duplication of emails within your archive, only you can advise Mimecast when your email system began Journaling all emails, or alternatively advise Mimecast to import all data.

To avoid any gaps in your archived data, it is critical that the customer provides the correct Cut-off Date.

Ingestion Cut-off Date

In order to ensure that you have a complete email history in your Mimecast Archive whilst minimizing duplicates, you must establish and advise Mimecast of the Cut-off Date. This date is typically based on your email routing through Mimecast for Inbound, Outbound and Internal emails (Journaling) which is an Ingestion prerequisite (Microsoft Exchange Journaling), and is usually established in the Connect process. If this date is not assessed correctly, there may be a data gap in your archive, or in certain circumstances, you may have email duplicates in your archive.

All items provided for ingestion and that were sent after the Cut-off Date will not be ingested as these should already exist in your Mimecast Archive, if the provided data is collated and exported from your Journal enabled environment. If the data has never been archived in your Mimecast account, such as data from another company’s system, then it is likely you will advise to use no cutoff date and ingest all data provided.

If you upgraded your Mimecast package or retention policy, the older data may have already expired on the platform. If you are unsure what date to use for your ingestion cut-off due to a retention upgrade, please reply or contact the Ingestion team to discuss.

To reduce the possibility of duplication of emails within your archive, only you can advise Mimecast when your email system began Journaling all emails, or alternatively advise Mimecast to import all data.

Example

You configure your routing through Mimecast as follows:

Outbound: 1 March 2013

Internal (Journaling): 2 March 2013

Inbound: 3 March 2013

The Cut-off Date is therefore the 2nd March 2013. Any data prior to this date should be collected for import, as all data from this date onwards will be archived by Mimecast.

AD/LDAP Synchronization

By default, a user can access emails in the archive where their SMTP address is either the sender or recipient. The Legacy Archive Data Management process utilizes Mimecast Directory Sync connections to attempt to resolve any internal recipient Exchange formatted addresses (Legacy Exchange Distinguished Names - LEDNs) to their Active Directory (AD) accounts’ primary SMTP address.

In order to resolve these addresses, it is important that the Directory Sync Connections are successfully syncing with all AD servers that contain the email recipients, and that your environment permits inbound access from all Mimecast IPs to these servers. Contact the Legacy Archive Data Management team if this is not the case.

Specifications for Data Collection

The following should be considered before commencing with the Export and Collection of data.

Accepted File and Message Formats

Only the following two file types are accepted for import. Data of any other format that is provided will be ignored.

Formatted as either Internet standard RFC 822 or EJF messages only. EMLs contain text in either of these two formats/layouts, and they can vary dramatically depending on the export utility, so contact your local Legacy Archive Data Management team to discuss.

Backup Storage

Before sending the data to be imported to Mimecast, ensure that a local copy is available and is stored as a backup for the entire Legacy Archive Data Management process, in case of critical failures or issues with the provided data or transfer media.

Legacy Archive Data Management Commences

Once the Legacy Archive Data Management purchase is recorded and your Mimecast service account is configured, two message templates, which include a link to this Legacy Archive Data Management guide, are sent to the customer Legacy Archive Data Management contacts. The contacts only are authorized to request privileged tasks, and may only be changed by emailed request from the current Legacy Archive Data Management contact.